Formulation chemists in the Surface Actives Ingredients (surfactants) and agrochemical markets realize the potential for applying Design of Experiments (DOE) methods to assess the impact of many variables on the performance, shelf-life, delivery characteristics, contamination susceptibility, and customer satisfaction of their products. Due to the complexity of the formulation recipes and the number of variables to be evaluated, DOE techniques generate matrices of tens of thousands of experiments that must be conducted to explore and refine the experimental space for these products. The shear number of experiments required renders typical bench chemistry techniques ineffective. The invention described herein provides the formulation chemist with a means of tackling these large DOE matrices in an automated fashion.
The Summary of the Invention is followed by a Detailed Description of the system. Finally, a Process Description provides step-by-step preparation and testing methodologies for a typical Solution in Water (SL) recipe and a Suspension Concentrate (SC) formulation recipe that is prepared and tested on the invention.